April 21st 2016 is a date burned into my memory. It was unseasonably cold. My son's weekly cricket practice had begun despite football having yet to end. Which is why I found myself standing on the edge of a cricket pitch, bracing myself against the elements with my husband standing next to me, already tetchy about how the blustery wind would affect play. He was making polite conversation with another parent when I got a text - 'is this true?' with a link to a site announcing my all time hero, Prince had died. I was certain it was a hoax. But messages on facebook started to ping through and it the crushing news was in fact true. I started to cry and all I remember is my husband shushing me, mortified that I was acting like such an emotional loon in front of random parents. It was the day my all time favourite musician died - but unbeknownst to me, an incredible crime writer died that day also - Michelle McNamara. Only later did I discover that not only do we share the same birthday, but she too had loved Prince....
Two years later I chanced upon an article about a woman writer who attempted to catch a serial killer from her daughter's playroom. While her family were peacefully sleeping, Michelle would stay up into the wee hours, trawling websites and hunting for clues to track down the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, the Original Nightstalker (EARONS) or as Michelle cleverly coined him - The Golden State Killer. Michelle called her book, 'I'll Be Gone In The Dark' - a reference to a line that the monster hissed to those he raped: 'Make one move and you'll be silent forever... and I'll be gone in the dark.'
When Michelle was a teenager, growing up in Kansas City, Missouri - less than a mile away from her home, a 24 year old woman called Kathleen Lombardo was brutally murdered while out on an evening run. She had been dragged into an alley and had her throat sliced. Two days later Michelle walked the same steps Lombardo had taken and picked up the fragments of her shattered Walkman that lay on the ground. From that day onwards, unsolved murders became Michelle's obsession.
Michelle was fascinated by the fact The Golden State Killer is the most prolific serial killer that you have never heard of. She was curious as to why he wasn't widely known and why the cases remained unsolved. Between 1973 and 1986 he committed at least 120 vicious burglaries, 50 violent rapes and 13 brutal murders across California. His crime sprees each spawned different nicknames as back in the pre-computer days, it took years for the individual police forces to connect the burglaries to the rapes and eventually the murders he carried out. Michelle told LA Magazine : 'However twisted the grins of those killers, however wild the eyes, we can at least stare solidly at them, knowing that evil has a shape and an expression and can be locked behind bars. Until we put a face on a psychopath like the Golden State Killer, he will continue to hold sway over us - he will remain a powerful cipher who triumphs by being just out of reach.'
As Michelle was midway through writing the book, aged just 46, a combination of an undiagnosed heart condition and a home-brewed concoction of anxiety meds and painkillers (including the drug that would cause Prince to overdose - Fentanyl) killed her in her sleep on April 21st, 2016. Her husband, the comedian Patton Oswalt, showed incredible determination by helping Michelle's researcher Paul Haynes and acclaimed investigative journalist Bill Jenson to join forces and complete it with the wealth of material Michelle left behind. It is an astonishing read. Michelle is equally concerned with getting under the skin of the determined lead investigators of the case as she is the unnamed killer himself. In her writing, the victims blossom from the page: their living breathing lives and relationships laid out: the person behind the number, the quirks behind the cold statistic.
There are details almost too raw to read: how the phone rang in the house of a victim, 20 odd years after her attack. She had lived at the address for 30 years. His voice was low, she recognised it immediately: 'Remember when he played?' he whispered. The 15 year-old victim who was alone in the house playing the piano when she felt a presence behind her. After the rape she no longer played - always assuming that someone uninvited would appear behind her. The plates that the rapist placed on the bound husbands' backs as he led their wives away to another room to be raped. He would warn them that if a plate dropped he would murder them both. The 13 year old victim who asked her dog 'why didn't you do something dummy?' There is a simple cruelty in taking items which only held sentimental value to the owners; he wanted to infiltrate their lives, destroy them, humiliate them and take from them every last breath of security they ever felt. Blindfolded and bound victims remember lying silently for 45 minutes and beginning to move only to feel the blade of his knife against their neck and his heavy breathing - he had been silent but present the whole time.
The Epilogue of the book is entitled: 'Letter to an Old Man' - as the killer was then still at large - but Michelle was convinced that he wouldn't remain free. That a police car would pull up to the curb. 'This is how it ends for you,' she promised. She desperately wanted to know his face. 'Open the Door, show us your face. Walk into the light.' Her dogged pursuit of the case kept it in the limelight, helped people to remember, forced questions to be answered.
I finished the book in April 2018 and as I literally closed the cover and googled some more info, I was stunned to discover that he had just been caught. As predicted by Michelle - it was through a public genealogy website. The police had tracked him down as a potential suspect and raided his bins to ascertain if the DNA was indeed a match. Joseph James DeAngelo, father of three daughters, was roasting a chicken in the oven when he was arrested. This is how it ends for you. In June 2020 he pleaded guilty to 13 counts of first degree murder and will spend the rest of his life behind bars. While the rape cases had passed the statute of limitations - the survivors were allowed to address the pathetic excuse of a man in court. They did so with tremendous courage. In the documentary of the book 'I'll be Gone in the Dark' (on HBO) many of the survivors movingly gather together - able to rebuild their lives knowing the man who tried to ruin their lives - but failed to do so - is at last behind bars. The tragedy is that Michelle is not alive the witness this.
Looking at the frail old man, it is hard to imagine that any human being would be capable of such cruelty - and I can't help but think Michelle was right. In seeing his face - bald, wrinkled, weathered - or even the faded photos of how he looked at the height of his crimes - baby faced, thick nose, frighteningly ordinary - he loses his mystery, his power. Relatives in the documentary talk of a sweet man, 'Uncle Joe' and they cannot reconcile the man they knew with the atrocities he committed. Perhaps this is why he escaped detection for so long - he was just a face in the crowd; he moved amongst people, silent, observing, impassive, blank.
He isn't clever - just lucky. In todays era he would be unable to prowl neighbourhoods as he did - CCTV would have spotted him in a heartbeat. Phonecalls would be traceable; DNA lifted at the scene of the first crime. His face would have been captured on a mobile phone; mid attack a child in another room would have called the cops from his iPad; security cameras would have unearthed his every movement.
Michelle can rest in peace. Something, his dark hollow soul will never be able to do.
